WASHINGTON - House Speaker John Boehner today responded to President Obama’s deficit reduction
plan – one Boehner has called “nonsense” – by offering a plan from Obama’s own deficit reduction
commission.

Both men are in tough negotiations over how to deal with the so-called “fiscal cliff” – a
combination of spending cuts as well as the expiration of 2001 and 2003 tax cuts – that many
economists predict could send the economy into a recession of not properly dealt with.

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner made an offer to Boehner that Boehner quickly
rejected.

“It was not a serious offer,” he said on Fox News Sunday.

Boehner, R-West Chester, along with his House Republican leadership team, instead offered up
a $2.2 trillion deficit reduction plan that would combine tax reform, discretionary spending cuts
and increasing the eligibility age for Medicare and other entitlement programs.

“This is by no means an adequate long-term solution, as resolving our long-term fiscal crisis
will require fundamental entitlement reform,” Boehner and other House Republican leaders wrote in a
letter to Obama. “Indeed the Bowles plan is exactly the kind of imperfect, but fair middle ground
that allows us to avert the fiscal cliff without hurting our economy and destroying jobs. We
believe it warrants immediate consideration.”

Specifically, their plan calls for $800 billion in revenue through tax reform, $600 billion
through health savings, $300 billion through “other mandatory savings,” $200 billion through
revision to the Consumer Price Index and $300 billion of other discretionary savings.

The group cited Nov. 1, 2011 testimony by Democrat Erskine Bowles, who headed the
Simpson-Bowles Deficit Reduction committee, to a specially appointed congressional committee tasked
with deficit reduction, in reaching their numbers.

Boehner himself had criticized a plan presented by Obama last week, saying it essentially was
Obama’s own budget plan from last year, which neither passed the House nor the Senate. A
senior House GOP aide
said today that while Republicans could’ve countered with House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s own
budget plan.

“We’re not doing that,” the aide said. “Because we don’t have the time.”

“Going over the cliff would hurt the economy, hurt job creators in our country,” Boehner said
today. He called the White House’s proposal a “la-la land offer” that could not pass the House or
the Senate.

He called the Republicans’ plan “a credible plan that deserves serious consideration by the
White House.”